Empty Nurseries
by moonswirl
Summary: Gleekathon, day two hundred and ninety-three: They could all have been her father, but now none of them are.


_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 13th cycle. Now cycle 14!_

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**"Empty Nurseries"  
Will, Finn, Puck **

The bus rolling on back toward Lima was heavy with silence. They could hear every bit of the workings of the bus, the road under its wheels, the sounds of the night and the cars passing by.

The majority thought of the crushing defeat they'd just suffered, without a doubt. But there were three of them who had something else to think about, some more than others. Each of them had gravitated around holding paternity of that little girl born earlier in the afternoon.

One had been deceived into thinking his unborn daughter would be the result of conception and not adoption, only to have it all fall to pieces, along with his marriage. Will couldn't help but think how if he hadn't found that pad, he might still have been believing the lie, and he would have somehow received the newborn, thinking she had been delivered by Terri and belonged to them, their blood… and then gone right back to work, staring unknowingly into her true mother's eyes.

He wouldn't have known. He would have loved her, raised her. If he had known she wasn't biologically his from the start, he… He would have loved her, raised her… But Terri had lied, and he'd found out… and as much as he could want to, he couldn't forget about it… a betrayal on so many levels which had in the end led to the divorce.

It hadn't quelled his fatherly desires, by any means. And for the next few months he'd been left to contemplate this fact, over and over… It would have been his daughter, it would have been his child. Without being so conscious of it, he'd become increasingly protective of Quinn.

The second of that trio had been fused to the wool pulled over his eyes, his girlfriend passing on the burden of fatherhood on to him when it belonged to his best friend and second betrayer. Finn had suffered greatly in the aftermath of that wool being ripped away. There was so much, all these things.

Whether he knew it or not, it had changed things in his relationship with his mother. For a while he hadn't told her a thing. To him she'd already done so much for him and it would have been too much. In keeping her out of it, he had been made to grow, to handle things he'd had to figure out and deal with on his own instead of with her help. But then she had found out, she had helped, but… the secrecy, and what he saw as his letting her down, it was still there… and it remained once the truth had come and they learned they wouldn't be father and grandmother each.

Then of course there was Quinn, and Puck… how they'd fooled him, how they'd betrayed him, and how he'd never noticed and no doubt never would have if Rachel hadn't spelled it out for him… It wasn't even so much the lie, though it had its part. It was everything he'd had to do, and feel, the emotional investment he'd put in the child so happily thought of as Drizzle… He should have known… then maybe it wouldn't hurt so much.

And then there was the third and last of them, and unlike the others, he had had something so very opposite. They had been told to be her father but weren't really, but he was her father very and truly… but made to hide it. They had been trusted, he was called incompetent. They had had months to part with the idea of her… he'd had minutes.

Puck would have loved nothing more than to pretend that nothing was wrong, that he would move along like it was all okay. He'd tell them it was fine, that he completely agreed with Quinn's decision… He wouldn't tell them the other part. He wouldn't say how he'd finally felt this great purpose, how it was almost as though he'd been preparing for this all his life… his father leaving, having to be there for his little sister.

There it was, his role, his place. He'd be a good dad to her, he'd be a great dad. It wasn't what he'd thought his life would be, and maybe that was better off. Only the problem was all this time he'd been so busy thinking about what would be, he'd forgotten what was… what was right in front of him. And then it had been there: his daughter would be someone else's daughter, not his… now he didn't know what to do with himself…

Each of them thought of the fourth guy, the one who would be the father this little girl would know. They hoped he would be good, that he would be everything for her that they'd wanted to be for her, tried to be. They hoped she would feel all of the love centered around her, even before her birth.

THE END

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**_[A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, story alert won't get you anything! ;)]_**


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